Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
participants. The age, sex, social status and educational level
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participants. The age, sex, social status and educational level of the speaker (or writer) and listener (or reader), all affect Language and Communication 32 the mode of expression used. It is relatively easy for a native speaker to tell, even from a snatch of conversation, who is speaking to whom. Just hearing the sentences, ‘Excuse me, please, do you have the time?’, ‘Find out what time it is, would you?’, or ‘Try to tell the time for Mummy, dear’ is quite sufficient to conjure up a vision of two people who could possibly be involved in each exchange. The next two factors are closely connected with each other. They are the actual situation in which the language occurs and the kind of contact between the participants. The importance of the situation itself has always been recognised, and is heavily emphasised in ‘situational’ language courses, as well as in travellers’ phrase books, where it becomes clear that the language varies according to whether one is shopping, or asking for directions, or booking a hotel room, etc. Depending on the situation, the contact between the participants could be either in speech or in writing, and at any point on the range of proximity, i.e. face-to-face (close or distant), not face-to-face (two-way contact by telephone or correspondence), or one- way contact (radio, TV, advertisement, notice). Once again, it is relatively simple to suggest appropriate contexts for random items like ‘Time?’, ‘My watch has stopped’, ‘Have you the time, please?’, ‘Is there a clock here? I need to know the right time.’ Simply by observing the choice of expression, one can postulate circumstances in which one or the other would be likely to be written rather than spoken, used in one place rather than another. Another parameter that deserves more recognition than it has had in language teaching is the nature of the subject matter or topic or field of discourse. Its influence has been recognised for extreme cases of English for Special Purposes such as technical usage, international aviation English, legal terminology, and the like. But even in very minor and apparently trivial domestic contexts, the topic quite manifestly influences the language. ‘He’ll come down in 60 seconds’ and ‘He’ll come down in a minute’, though they appear to have identical time-reference, are obviously not connected with the same subject matter, any more than are ‘The parties agree to abide by the terms hereinafter stated’ and ‘Let’s shake on it.’ All these factors determined by the context are external to the participant, and are universal only in the sense that they Language and Communication 33 operate in all languages. But just how they operate differs very widely indeed, not only between language, but between different speech communities using the same language. Different languages have different techniques for indicating social status for example. It can be done by special terms like ‘Sir’, or the use or avoidance of first names, or by special pronouns or verb forms. In English itself, speakers in Southern England may signal the social class they wish to be associated with by using certain accent features in their speech, while in Australia accent is less significant than the vocabulary used. Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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